Re: [tied] Re: Mercury and lead

tgpedersen@... wrote:

> --- In cybalist@..., Omar Karamán <diogenes@...> wrote:
> >As to 16th century Spanish, this is what was told:
> At that time, x was pronounced as sh, and j as zh (the voiced
> equivalent). This is the same situation as in Portuguese today and in
> older French (I have no date for this), e.g. <chevaux>, pl. of
> <cheval> would be pronounced cheváush (sort of portuguese-like
> inflection, yes?).
> At a certain time sh -> kh, and zh -> kh, the present day
> pronounciation of the letter j. Since now both the letters j and x
> were pronounced the same, the letter x was generally replaced by j in
> Spanish orthography.
> Examples: The original Aztec pronounciation of Mexico (Aztec word) is
> Meshiko (forgot about vowel lengths and such). In Basque you see the
> spelling tx- for ch-, which makes sense as t-sh-. The state of Texas
> was originally spelled Tejas, pronounced Tezhas.
>
> Torsten

In South American Spanish, x and j represents very different sounds. In
Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, for example, both are very different in
fact. x is something like /ks/ and j is the velar fricative that I told
about and I don't know how to represent (I am not a linguist). After
all, believe me, I
am a native Spanish speaker and I can distinguish very well each sound:
they
are not equal.

Omar